Tuesday 14 July 2009 11.42 EDT
First published on Tuesday 14 July 2009 11.42 EDT

GlaxoSmithKline has granted South Africa's Aspen the right to make its HIV drug abacavir in a royalty-free licensing deal, on the day that a group of MPs called on manufacturers to put their HIV medicines in a "patent pool" to reduce prices.

Aspen will manufacture a cheaper, generic version of abacavir, also known as Ziagen. The deal was announced by GSK chief executive Andrew Witty on a visit to Kenya today and forms part of the company's efforts to cut the cost of anti-retroviral medicines for HIV in poorer countries.

The world's second-largest drugmaker also announced a new £50m fund to support non-governmental organisations working with pregnant women to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV. A further £10m will go to support public-private partnership work in developing Aids medicines for children.

While welcoming the initiatives, MPs and campaigners said GSK, and other pharmaceutical companies, must do more. David Borrow, who chairs the all-party parliamentary group on Aids, said: "GSK is taking positive steps, but they are broadly unilateral, which will limit their impact. We would like to see them sign up to the Unitaid patent pool, a proposal which the Department for International Development and all the major UK charities, like Oxfam, support."

Unitaid is the leading international organisation pushing for a patent pool that would allow generic firms to produce HIV medicines cheaply for developing countries.

Borrow stressed the importance of reducing the price of second-line treatments, a combination of new drugs given to patients who have become resistant to the drugs initially administered to them. Second-line treatments cost seven times as much as first-line drugs.

"The most effective way to reduce prices would be a patent pool approach, rather than individual deals between companies," said Borrow.

The parliamentary group on Aids today published a report entitled The Treatment Timebomb, which said that by 2030 more than 50 million people will need HIV treatment compared to just 9 million today.

While GSK took the lead in February, announcing it would place many drug patents for tropical diseases into a free pool, Witty rejected calls for the inclusion of HIV drugs. "The patent pool on neglected diseases was because there was really no research going on in that area – HIV is not a neglected disease," he said. "I can't see how a patent pool in this particular area would change things dramatically."

Dr Tido von Schoen-Angerer, director of Médecins Sans Frontières' Campaign for Access to Essential Medicines, said: "Some have been quite positive about it. It's a bit difficult to see why GSK is hesitating on this."

So far Glaxo is the only major drugmaker that has committed to pool some patents, although it was joined in the initiative last week by US biotech Alnylam Pharmaceuticals.